Danny Boyle
If you have to be persuaded about something, you shouldn't do it.
When they're good, there is nothing like a big film.
Although computer chips now are thinner, they're more powerful, they're not as reliable. You'd harvest computer chips from the 1980s from all around the world because they're reliable.
I haven't got anything against films that are about the minutia of relationships or customs, but I love extremes.
I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you're not relying on things you've done before.
I don't want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.
Movies about space raise those questions of what we're doing here, and that inevitably introduces a spiritual dimension.
I love cities.
I made this film 'The Beach,' which didn't take place in a city, and it didn't really suit me.
Good storytelling for me is not so much technical expertise, which I know is applauded often; it's actually freshness of approach. It does mean you sometimes stumble and fall and make a horrible mess of things in seeking that freshness, but you should always keep trying to do that.Collection: Fall
People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear. Although the moment that it happens might be terribly sad and moving, five minutes later, if you're asked to remember that person, you go, "Oh right, yeah, yeah!" 'Cause you're just moving forward.Collection: Moving
If you approach India in the right way, you have so much to learn there about people, and there's so many people. It's such an extraordinary setup, and it's so bewildering how it manages to get through somehow, you can only wonder at it.Collection: People
Directing is a mixture of compromise and perfectionism. When you lose the judgment of which is more important at any particular moment, you're time is over. They find you out and send you packing.Collection: Important
We want to see drama told in a cathartic way, with power, with emotion where you empathize and then you're frightened. All those feelings charge up in you and you feel for the story.Collection: Drama
It's interesting, the worse things get in cities, the tougher that cities get, the more brutal the humor is. The tougher things people face, the darker the sense of humor gets and I find that incredibly optimistic.Collection: Optimistic
There is a Steve [Jobs] that Apple would like to actually present to the public. They have a character, Steve, and they want to keep that story going. And it's very important that writers challenge that occasionally and not just trust their parent companies to tell them.Collection: Jobs
One of the traditions of film acting is a sort of mumbled realism. Be minimal, and do less. 'Even less than that.'Collection: Acting
The awards season gives a chance for independent films to have a bit of longevity in the press and the media.Collection: Independent
My kids are too old to remember this now but, when they were much younger, I swore to them if this miracle ever happened, I would receive it in the spirit of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, and thats what that was.Collection: Kids
I dont see much difference between it and the other films though I can see on a rational and intelligent level there is a big difference.Collection: Intelligent
Even though one of them is about an Edinburgh junkie and ones a little boy of eight in Manchester, you want them to always portray their world in such a vivid way that the audience can disappear inside the story.Collection: Boys
Its easy to like the most popular films, but I have a great fondness for A Life Less Ordinary.Collection: Ordinary
I don't want to make pompous, serious films.Collection: Want
Theres a certain truth that you do end up making the same film again and again so if you vary the genre you have a chance of breaking that cycle.Collection: Chance
There's lots of things that can be solved with cash. And there's occasional things that can't be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there's no distinction between the two. There's no way of reading a situation and saying, "Yes, that'll be a bureaucratic nightmare, but that one we'll be able to buy off." It just depends on the day, apparently.Collection: Reading
Most films that I do, whether successful or not, just fade away. They have their moment in the sun, then they are gone. 'Trainspotting' did not, and especially with journalists. So whenever I launched a new film, I'd end up talking about 'Trainspotting.'Collection: Successful
I find it difficult enough being called "Mr. Boyle," which as I age I'm increasingly called.Collection: Age
Everybody knows Aaron Sorkin's scripts. There's a huge amount of lines. There's a huge amount of interchange. You gotta do a lot of learning to be able to get it up to pace.Collection: Pace
I've just been to the Taj Mahal which I'd never been to and I'm not a very romantic kind of guy but it is the most romantic thing I've ever seen.Collection: Guy
It just seduces you when you read a story and your brain relates to it. You recognize or connect with it. You identify with it; you're bound to.Collection: Brain
Everybody expects you to be qualified to talk about your films, but in a way, you're the least qualified person to talk about them. When you're finished, you don't watch them at all.Collection: Watches
Your first film is always your best film, in a way. There's something about your first film that you never ever get back to, but you should always try. It's that slight sense of not knowing what you're doing, because the technical skills you learn - especially if you have a film that works, that has some kind of success - are beguiling. The temptation is to use them again, and they're not necessarily good storytelling techniques.Collection: Skills
I'm always after putting people in extreme circumstances. I'm always after not knowing what I'm doing in those extreme circumstances.Collection: Knowing
To force yourself out of the comfort zone, the main ingredient is trying to work in a world where you haven't been before, that you don't know the rules of. And that involves a lot of research, so you begin to see where the other people have been, but you are starting from as vulnerable and as low a point as possible.Collection: People
Once, a French journalist told me that all my films are the same. I said, 'Excuse me? I work hard to make them different.' What she meant was that in my films there is a character that faces insurmountable odds, and they overcome them. But I thought that might be true, but you need certain factors for drama, and you need to overcome them.Collection: Drama
Film industry is a pretty brutal business. If you fall too far behind, all of the perfectionism in the world won't save you.Collection: Fall
The most extraordinary thing, you'd be given permission for, and then the weirdest, simplest things, you just wouldn't be able to obtain permissions. And it would go on and on and on forever and ever, and there was no way to know. You have to kind of approach it with an open, quite optimistic mind, no matter what's thrown at you, because it will only ever result in damaging the film if you let any kind of despondency get to you.Collection: Optimistic
There's lots of things that can be solved with cash. And there's occasional things that can't be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there's no distinction between the two.Collection: Two
You use elements of noir, but you don't want it to be too noir-ish. You don't want it to be advertised as though you're asking people to go and watch an updated noir. I don't think they'll go do that. They want to see a modern story.Collection: Thinking
I have a philosophy, a belief, which I can see in many, many other directors that your early work is your best work, because you don't know what you're doing.Collection: Philosophy
I like to hide behind my intellect. But the truth is, unless all of us start getting honest about what the reality is, things aren't going to change. If we all keep pretending that we know stuff and if everyone else would do what we knew and everything would be a better place, then nothing is going to change.Collection: Reality
Normally, I'm a very controlling director. Directors are controlling. It's part of the job, but there's various degrees of it and the constructs I normally work on are very controlling constructs.Collection: Jobs
Basically, actors arrive in a bubble. They have a little sealed bubble around them and it's basically [comprised of] their agents, their last film, their next film, their press agent, and their per diems - all these things, they cocoon themselves with and you have to puncture that bubble on each of them to make them be in your film.Collection: Cocoons
To create the reality of space with this sense of suspension: nothing's happening, it's endless; we're traveling at 28,000 kilometers an hour but nothing's happening. Nothing! And you have to do that! There are all these rules you have to follow, I've never known anything like it.Collection: Reality
There are three huge, titanic, space movies which if you ever make a film [about space] you cannot avoid. You may want to avoid them but you cannot. I've never known a genre like it where you are dictated to by these films, 2001, Alien, and Tarkovsky's Solaris.Collection: Space
You live your life and it ends quite quickly and all you can do with it is pass it on decently to someone else. Whether directly or indirectly, behave decently to other people.Collection: People
I haven't got anything against films that are about the minutia of relationships or customs, but I love extremes. I love taking a bunch of characters and it usually is a bunch of characters, and you throw something at them that's usually extreme, like a bag of money, or you send them out to explode a nuclear device on the surface of the sun. And those extremes are wonderful for drama.Collection: Drama
I think women assess time passage much better than men - because of their biological clocks - and they are much more realistic about measuring out time, whereas men tend to hang onto things. Women acknowledge the biology of their time, and dance through the beat of that drum...whereas men just drum.Collection: Thinking
You can do anything you like - really - but this Sci-Fi is absolutely disciplined, it's Zen, you have to be absolutely focused in an area. You have to zone into an area and you then you can achieve when you get there. It's really weird!Collection: Achieve